Poncle, the studio behind Vampire Survivors, has clarified that it is working on 15 projects, not games, as erroneously implied from the interview the studio’s chief strategy officer, Matteo Sapio, granted to The Game Business.
“We are not talking about a gigantic remote studio, Sapio said. “We are thinking about it like a federation of studios. Our idea is to have little teams of people – five, 10, 15 – working on different projects.”
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“The structure will be, we will have a designer, a bunch of producers, and this little team that’s agile and flexible. That is how we think we will maintain this spirit. Because what is the indie spirit? It is mainly freedom and taking risks with ideas.”
During the interview, Sapio said the studio was ploughing back the success from Vampire Survivors into a spinoff like Vampire Crawlers (which was released this week), original IP titles, and new Survivors games based on popular IP, like Warhammer 40k.
Consequently, Poncle is opening new studios in Japan and Italy. These new offices will help collaborate with local companies. Also revealed in the interview is that Poncle has applied the brakes on its publishing business. Berserk or Die and Kill The Brickman are two third-party titles Poncle published last year.
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“Vampire Survivors came from a solo developer,” Sapio said. “It was Luca Galanta, who made a game for him and his friends. Vampire Survivors exploded, and in two or three months, it sold more than one million copies.
“Luca’s yachts are video games. So instead of buying a yacht, he made the Emerald Beyond DLC [for Vampire Survivors] with Square Enix, which we released for free. Things grew organically from there.”
Vampire Survivors is a 2022 roguelike release with bullet-hell elements. Following the misinterpretation from the interview, the company clarified on X that they are “working on 15 Projects, not 15 games”, and “this includes VS, DLCs, free updates, our published games, etc.”
